“SEO is a marketing function for sure, but it needs to be baked into a product, not slapped on like icing after the cake is baked.”

Duane Forrester

Small businesses do count!

We live in a world of small businesses, and apparently they are the driving force behind a successful economy. Last month, the British Prime Minister boldly stated emerging businesses are the way of the future, saying Britain needs to “back small firms. Boost enterprise. Be on the side of everyone in this country who wants to create jobs, and wealth and opportunity.”

Granted, politicians love to say this perennially, but figures speak louder than words. According to the UK Small Business Association, over 99% of registered businesses in the United Kingdom are considered small to medium businesses. Likewise, the US government’s Small Business Administration cites 99.7% of US companies are small businesses. These small companies are set to create jobs, create wealth, and bring the world back to its prosperous self…assuming we treat them well.

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) conducted a study of 10,000 firms and found that one in five (21%) managers have settled professional bills with their personal credit cards in the past year. John Wright, chairman of the FSB, explained that many companies have had to become more self-reliant as they are struggling to secure credit, as well as other necessary services, from banks. This includes access to a merchant accounts and services – services many enterprises rely on to process money and payments.

Our banks are simply not catering to our small businesses. An international company can get merchant services in the blink of a credit card swipe, but these small businesses that are driving our economy struggle to get a face-to-face meeting. Small business owners can’t be expected to kick start a boom in the economy without support that will make their financial systems flow with ease. Trading online, or ‘e-tail’ as it is increasingly being known as, is the method many of these businesses use to trade their goods and services. Rather than relying on the elusive services a bank can offer, these businesses need to turn to smaller, more intimate solutions provided by less occupied payment service providers, such as Waspit. Relying on Waspit for your payment solutions will result in a more bespoke system, catered to your specific business needs. It also means you will have a personal relationship with the whole Waspit team, rather than the stunted relationship with bigger businesses that often require you to call a million numbers before you can actually speak with someone helpful.

This added personalised relationship results in a much more trustworthy environment, eliminating the financial worry experienced by many start-ups and small businesses trading online who struggle to trust relationships with banks that are often void of any real professional connection. When competing with fellow customers that run the business world, it’s easy to feel insignificant. According to The Thomson Reuters/PayNet index, smaller firms account for as much as 80 percent of new hiring in the US. In literal terms, these start-ups and growing enterprises will employ 8 of every 10 people hired in the United States in 2011. And yet, securing a reliable payment solution method from your average bank is like entering Fort Knox. It must be said – why struggle to enter a barred up gate when Waspit will open the gate for you and welcome you in?

Starting up a small business will never be the easiest of tasks, and attempting to eradicate financial concerns in any business may seem futile. But, it is these small drops in the ocean that can create a wave of change. Providing trustworthy payment solutions, mixed in with personal relationship with these small businesses helps ease worries and allows employees to focus on business growth.

SEO and SEM are not competing services. SEO is considered a subset of SEM services. Today, if you want to conduct business on the Internet you need to be visible in both organic and advertised links, which means you need both SEO and SEM.

Internet Marketing

One of the very first things you need to decide when setting up a new website or blog, is whether to use www or no www in front of your domain. It’s a decision you need to take once in the beginning and stick to it for the lifetime of your website. In this post, […]

Have you ever wondered how many times per day you use Google or any other search engine to search the web? Is it 5 times, 10 times or even sometimes more? Did you know that Google alone handles more than 2 trillion searches per year? The numbers are huge. Search engines have become part of […]

It is necessary to have a blog post promotion strategy, simply because without one, your hardly produced content will not reach its full potential. Promoting your new blog posts in any valid way you can is not something optional but is necessary for your web site’s success. Every time you publish new content, it’s a […]

Link building is the most challenging part of the whole SEO process. Everybody knows that in order to get high rankings you need strong links pointing to your website and yet the question remains, how to you build links to your website that can positively influence your rankings? There is no easy answer. Link building […]

Blogging is a valuable tool for all online businesses and that includes ecommerce stores. Through blogging you can increase traffic coming to your website either organically (search traffic) or from social media networks. It’s great for brand awareness, customer support and if done correctly, rankings and conversions. Why should all ecommerce websites have a dedicated […]